SENATE BUDGET SHOULD BE DEATH KNELL FOR BULLET TRAIN

In a just world, the California High-Speed Rail Authority would have shut down long ago, undone by the grossly deceptive campaign used in 2008 to convince voters to hand over $9.95 billion in bond seed money for a statewide system of bullet trains.

Virtually all of the agency’s key campaign claims – about the project’s cost, ridership, interest of private investors, cost of tickets and more – proved false. The deceptions were particularly intense for voters in our region, who were told that they could count on bullet-train stations in Murrieta, Escondido and San Diego. That’s now about as likely as Barstow being awarded the 2024 Summer Olympics.

Indeed, it’s increasingly questionable that the project will even reach Los Angeles or San Francisco – even with the construction of the $6 billion initial phase of the system in the Central Valley just a few months off. After that segment is finished, the rail authority will have at most about $6 billion left of its original state bond funds and $3.5 billion in federal funding. That’s less than 10 percent of the $62 billion it would cost to build the remaining segments linking the state’s two biggest metropolitan areas.

And guess what? There is no identified source for that funding – none. As has become abundantly clear over the past four years, private investors will never offer a dime without revenue or ridership guarantees that are illegal under the terms of the 2008 initiative.

But project supporters, with the encouragement of the Obama administration, have said the federal government would come to the rescue. The events of this week have moved that claim from the category of very unlikely to utterly preposterous.

It’s already well-established that the Republicans who control the U.S. House will block major future funding for California’s bullet-train boondoggle.

Now it looks like that’s also the case for the Democrats who control the U.S. Senate. Last week, Senate Budget Chairwoman Patty Murray, D-Wash., released a proposed 10-year budget, the first her party has put forward in more than three years. The 114-page document proposes a total of $100 billion in infrastructure spending over a decade for all 50 states – and for many causes: upgrading roads and bridges, transit and rail systems, ports and waterways, airports, water infrastructure and energy transmission systems and expanding broadband technology.

The budget never mentions the California bullet train, which needs many billions more in federal money just to build the second segment, much less the L.A.-San Francisco route.

So why is California about to waste $6 billion to start a project that has no feasible path to completion? This is a debate that we need to have, now more than ever.

Who should lead the debate? Gov. Jerry Brown, of course, the man who used to call bullet-train skeptics “declinists.” If Brown still thinks he has the facts on his side, we would like to hear why.